Chetan Bhagat as literature: We must forego some of our elitism
He is the best best-selling author that India has ever seen, and now he maybe officially part of the English literature curriculum. Chetan Bhagat's novels may soon be included in Delhi University syllabus, but why does it give many a self-proclaimed liberal a run for his/her arrogance?
Yes Chetan Bhagat often bats for the right-wing causes. True, he doesn't think the Ram temple and advocating the RSS version of the Ayodhya narrative are problemaic in the least. True, he doesn't understand national-level economics even though his books have pierced every known accepted wisdom of what makes a saleable book and what doesn't.
But is Chetan Bhagat literature?
The news of Chetan Bhagat's books becoming part of the DU canon has sent many off their comfort zones. We are mostly used to dissing Bhagat's works, which, let's be honest, can't really be called literary fiction, though they have been ruling the market ever since Five Point Someone burst into the scene with its IIT Delhi love and campus backdrop.
But why is it a problem that Five Point Someone might soon be included as part of the DU's "popular fiction" paper?
Writer Meena Kandasamy however has a very different take on the issue. She asks if it's our elitism that's preventing us from classifying Chetan Bhagat's work as "literature"? Are we guilty of intellectual snobbery, when tens of thousands of first-time readers find it easier to read Chetan Bhagat than say William Shakespeare or Salman Rushdie?
Here's what Kandasamy wrote on her Facebook page.
Not one to defend Chetan Bhagat, I've called him out when he said rubbish over Palestine or the Ram temple or whatever.
But I've to say that years and years ago, when I taught at Anna University--most of my engineering students had read only one fiction writer, and that was him.
In many cases, he was the only out-of-textbook reading that they did. And they did not read him the way we consume literary fiction - but they read him as an English-improvement device - underlining difficult words, and looking it up in the dictionary.
I don't know why or how they had zeroed in on his work, but that was an undeniable fact.
As a writer, I have my preferences, tastes, aesthetics, etc. Chetan Bhagat would not fit into any of my categories.
But as a teacher, I encouraged them to read anything, as long as they were reading in English and it was helping them learn the language. At least a fifth of the classes I thought (and sometimes, a third) were first-generation English learners - to them, he was accessible.
I think we must forego some of our elitism and grandstanding. No one is going to start somersaulting to Shakespearean sonnets unless they are able to converse/understand English.
So, if he's in the syllabus - good. Let's see what is making him popular, accessible, easy. Let's interrogate his text in our classes, let's see how he is largely a marketing phenomenon, let's call him out for his many biases - but let's not deny reality.
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